The Birth of "Religion and International Relations": Questions of Scale
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Discussing the Discipline
The Birth of “Religion and
International Relations”:
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
Questions of Scale
Nicholas Adams*
The field religion and international relations (IR) has been established over
the last twenty years within the discipline of IR. It marks a new (largely
twenty-first century) set of interdisciplinary engagements, bringing to-
gether political science and the sociology of religion. “Religion and IR”
and “religious studies” continue to conduct their business independently,
in different conferences, journals, and book series, but their interests in-
creasingly overlap. This enquiry interprets religion and IR as a “turn to
the local.” This is displayed in its concern with events at the local level that
have significance that travels up the scale of levels of analysis to events that
have international significance. The turn to the local offers compelling ar-
guments for shifting the focus in IR away from states and on to relations
between local, national, and international actors. Engaging here with influ-
ential works in religion and IR published over the last fifteen years, I argue
that it is the turn to the local that offers the most scope for collaboration
between scholars of religion and IR and scholars in religious studies.
THE STUDY OF RELIGION has over the last twenty years undergone
one of its periodic realignments. It is now a central concern in depart-
ments of politics, and especially in research centers whose focus is religion
*
Nicholas Adams, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Email: n.adams.1@bham.ac.uk.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2021, Vol. 89, No. 2, pp. 411–436
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfab028
Advance Access publication on April 20, 2021
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribu-
tion, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.412 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
and conflict, religion and peace, religion and international governance,
and other pairings of this kind. There is a new disciplinary settlement, or
series of settlements, in which the study of religion is often located out-
side departments of religion.1 In the present article, I make four principal
arguments about this development. First, these disciplinary settlements
largely proceed independently of each other, although there are a few
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
scholars who cross the borders. Second, those who established religion
and international relations (IR) saw it primarily as a consequence of the
failure of theories of secularization, especially in light of three decisive
cases: the Iranian Revolution, the end of the Cold War, and 9/11. Third,
this development is more pertinently a wider correction of the disciplinary
tendency in IR towards premature generalization: “religion and IR” cor-
rects this through a turn to the local. Fourth, closer collaboration between
scholars of religion interested in politics and political scientists interested
in religion depends substantially on this turn to the local. The purpose of
this article is to enable scholars of religion to see more clearly that their
concerns with local particularities are valuable to their colleagues in polit-
ical science but also a hazard: discussions that remain focused only on the
local are of limited interest to a discipline concerned with policy.
The core argument developed here is that the turn to the local sets the
conditions for more fruitful avenues for dialogue between religion and IR
and religious studies because of the scale at which investigations take place.
These avenues might enable a flow of intellectual traffic on three related
issues in religion and IR: (1) complementing a reliance on the sociology
of religion with a turn to the anthropology of religion, and especially local
fieldwork; (2) treating the work of historians and sociologists as disputable
evidence rather than facts; and (3) considering the effects of rival theoretical
approaches in historiography and the study of religion. These are potential
areas where scholars in theology and religious studies may have something
useful to contribute and that might enrich work in both disciplines.
POLITICS IN RELIGION AND RELIGION IN POLITICS
Alongside departments of theology, of religion, and of theology and
religion, religion has always appeared as a topic in other disciplines: in
history, in politics, in sociology, in philosophy, and in many others. The
two disciplinary groups addressed here—scholars of religion and IR and
scholars of religious studies—have rather different perspectives, however,
especially in relation to the perceived pace of their disciplines. The study
1
I owe the language of settlements to the anthropologist Timothy Jenkins (1999).Adams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 413
of religions is often an engagement with ancient texts and practices, even
if their interpretations are contemporary and constantly mutating. There
are classic studies that repay renewed study in each generation. Twenty
years is not long for a discipline whose objects span thousands of years
and whose methodological debates span over a hundred. By contrast, for
scholars of religion and IR, even ten years constitutes a long-term view
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
and something published twenty years ago is of largely historical interest.
This is in part because the purpose of religion and IR is to grasp con-
temporary issues and to speak into a fast-moving world of intervention,
strategy, and policy. This study concerns materials from as early as 2003;
some of them are considered by scholars of religion and IR, and perhaps
especially by early-career scholars, to be no longer relevant to the discip-
line on account of their advanced age. This is significant for those who
wish to grasp areas of potential interdisciplinary engagement: the most
fruitful terrain for such engagements will very likely be contemporary and
policy oriented.
The birth of religion and IR as a sub-discipline is a significant de-
velopment for religious studies. This article considers the relationship
between the fields of religion and IR and the study of religion. This en-
quiry is inspired in part by a programmatic claim made by Ron Hassner,
a leading scholar of religion and IR, nearly ten years ago: “The gulf separ-
ating the disciplines of international relations and religious studies need
not be exaggerated. The emerging social constructivist movement, in par-
ticular, has opened avenues for dialogue between these two areas of study”
(Hassner 2011, 6).
A range of work in religion and IR is considered here with a focus on
a central issue in that developing dialogue: the scale at which description
of religion is set. This is investigated to identify areas of proximity and
distance and to discover where the possibilities for generative dialogue
might lie.
The field of religion and IR looks, at first sight, to be an inter-
disciplinary engagement between the study of religion and the study
of IR, but to a significant extent this is not so. Religion and IR is a
sub-discipline of IR rather than the study of religion, and this is re-
flected in the journals to which its scholars typically contribute. It is
also worth noting that whereas the International Studies Association
has a section on religion, the American Academy of Religion does not
have a section on IR. It does have a section on religion and develop-
ment, which has significant input from IR scholars. It also has a religion
and politics unit, but its personnel are distinct from those who com-
pose the subfield of religion and IR, and its focus is more on religious414 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
discourse in the public sphere than on global politics; it also has a pol-
itical theology unit, whose focus is “the political” as a topic in theology.
There are research centers, larger and smaller, in religion and politics
in several US universities, including Boston University, Georgetown,
Northwestern, the University of Virginia, and Yale’s MacMillan Center.
(Harvard’s Belfer Center does not currently have a religion-related ini-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
tiative). There are graduate programs in religion and politics in major
US universities that connect scholars of religion with political scien-
tists. Some, such as the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairsat
Boston University, and Northwestern, are housed within politics (col-
laborating with scholars of religion); others, such as the International
Conflict Resolution Program at Columbia, Princeton, and the Religion,
Politics, and Conflict programat the University of Virginia, are located
within religion (engaging political scientists), while others still (e.g.,
Georgetown’s Berkley Center) have a dedicated research and teaching
unit. There are also political science programs (e.g., IR at UC Berkeley,
the Fletcher School at Tufts) where religious issues are taught by pol-
itical scientists and not by scholars of religion. The focus on reli-
gion is often simultaneously a focus on conflict or violence, and the
focus on conflict or violence is often simultaneously a focus on Islam.
Collaborations between scholars of religion and political scientists are
hosted in various ways in particular institutions. However, it appears
that scholars of religion who engage politics and scholars of politics
who engage religion encounter each other neither in their large discip-
linary conferences (although there are many small-scale conferences
on particular themes) nor for the most part in the journals in which
these scholars share their work (which are largely distinct, although
there are exceptions). This picture is mobile and fast-changing.
Reasons for taking an interest in religion have changed beyond recog-
nition over the last 200 years. From Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion in the 1820s to Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy ([1917] 1923)
and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (1961), the focus was com-
parison, and especially the idea that a study of other religious traditions
could shed light on one’s own “primitive” history. Its question was: How
is human reason embodied in such diverse expressions? Religion and
IR reflects a fundamental shift. The central topic is not variety but vio-
lence. Its question is: How can the violence of religion be understood and
mitigated? Many interdisciplinary alliances are forged between political
science and religious studies on the basis of this shift from variety to vio-
lence. The turn to the local is explored here as an alternative framework
of shared commitments.Adams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 415
Religion and IR is about twenty years old. The section of the
International Studies Association devoted to religion and IR hosts
sessions at its annual meeting and awards annual prizes for recent work
in the field.2 Those working in religion and IR publish in journals de-
voted to peace and conflict studies (including Journal of Peace Research
[1964–] and Conflict Management and Peace Science [1973–], to inter-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
national security (including International Security [1976–]), to IR as
a whole (including International Studies Review [1957–] and Review of
International Studies [1975–]), to sociology (including Social Research
[1934–] and Sociology of Religion [1973–]), and more recently the rela-
tively small number of journals devoted to religion and IR (Review of
Faith and International Affairs [2003–] and Journal of Religious and
Political Practice [2015–2018]) and the newly established Brill Research
Perspectives in Religion and Politics [2019–]). There are at least three pub-
lishers’ book series devoted to the field: Palgrave Macmillian’s “Culture
and Religion in International Relations” (seventeen titles 2002–2014; lead
editor Yosef Lapid), “Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics” (thirty-
five titles 2011–present; lead editor Jeffrey Haynes), and “Religion and
Conflict” from Cornell University Press (no titles yet; series editor Ron
Hassner).3 It is a firmly established and growing field of inquiry.
The focus here is theoretical, that is, on the kinds of questions to which
religion and IR scholarship is a set of answers. Several representative works
are considered here: Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler’s Bringing Religion
into International Relations (2004); Scott Thomas’s The Global Resurgence
of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (2005); Jeffrey
Haynes’s An Introduction to International Relations and Religion (2013);
Ron Hassner’s War on Sacred Grounds (2009); Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel
Philpott, and Samuel Shah’s God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global
Politics (2011); Nukhet Sandal and Jonathan Fox’s Religion in International
Relations Theory (2013); and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Beyond Religious
Freedom (2015). I choose these because they are widely read, influen-
tial works that develop a sustained argument about the role of religion
in IR by authors who continue to shape current research. There are in
addition several influential essay collections: Religion and International
Relations: The Return from Exile (2003), edited by Fabio Petito and Pavlos
Hatzopoulos; Religion and International Relations Theory (2011), edited
2
https://www.isanet.org/ISA/Sections/REL (accessed November 10, 2020). The three awards are
for best graduate student paper, the religion and IR book award, and religion and international studies
distinguished scholar award.
3
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14946; https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-
Religion-and-Politics/book-series/RSRP; https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/series/religion-and-
conflict/ (accessed November 10, 2020).416 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
by Jack Snyder; Religion, Identity and Global Governance (2011), edited by
Patrick James; and Rethinking Religion and World Affairs (2012), edited by
Timothy Samuel Shah, Alfred Stepan, and Monica Duffy Toft.
The scholars considered here ask the question: What is the role of
religion in political action worldwide? Their answers are focused on
establishing the importance of religion for IR. This was and remains a
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
necessary task given that “the main canonical works of international rela-
tions . . . hardly mention religion” (Snyder 2011, 1) and given what Haynes
calls “the deep-rooted, secular stubbornness of Western social sciences
[that refuse] to take religion seriously” (2013, 51). There is a contrast be-
tween what Haynes calls the accumulation of studies that demonstrate
the importance of religion for IR and the failure of “mainstream” IR
thinking to integrate religion as a significant category (2013, 52). This is
easily corroborated by perusing any university library’s shelves devoted to
IR. There are typically multiple copies of many different “introduction to
international relations” volumes: few of them explore the questions that
occupy scholars of religion, including those interested in politics; few of
them discuss religion, religious actors, or religious institutions; some (but
not many) have an index entry related to religion.
Why does mainstream IR neglect religion? Nearly every scholar in re-
ligion and IR has an answer to this question. Jeffrey Haynes offers a suc-
cinct and representative assessment:
The main reason that IR theory has little to say about religion is because
of the background, history and development of the discipline of IR. . .
. for hundreds of years, international relations, especially in the West,
has been both state-focused and secular in outlook. In recent centuries,
very few states—especially in the secular West—have had an organising
ideology that regards religion as more significant than secular—that is,
non-religious—principles, such as liberal democracy, capitalism, or com-
munism. (2013, 51)
The three conditions for inattention to religion in IR are (1) a focus on
the state, (2) a secular outlook, and (3) alternative organizing principles
such as democracy, capitalism, and communism.4 In other words, most
phenomena that can be described in religious terms can also be described
in other terms (something that many devout Christian theologians would
also affirm, incidentally), and this obstructs acknowledgement for the
need to add what looks like a redundant extra term.
4
We must leave to one side Max Weber’s proposal that capitalism and religion are not so easily
separated: Weber [1920] 2011.Adams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 417
Haynes’s three conditions for ignoring religion (the state, secularism,
alternative principles) are unsurprising: they match and very likely arise
from three recurring features of religion and IR scholarship. As a body
of scholarship, it marks a turn from the state to local actors, from secu-
larism to the study of religion, and it treats organizing principles as non-
reductive and non-exclusive (i.e., religion is not reducible to any of them,
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
and religion can and must be added to them).
It is worth noting that this secular outlook in IR is almost entirely im-
plicit. There is no articulated theory of secularization to be found in the
discipline of IR: it is taken for granted, and religion as a topic or concern
simply fails to appear for the most part.5
Haynes is also typical in his organization of the discussion. He intro-
duces emblematic events that force a consideration of religion (these
form the main focus of the next section). He attempts to specify what
makes something “religious”, he confronts the ill effects of “secularization
theory” on IR, he offers an alternative to an exclusive focus on the state,
and he commends the benefits that accompany the addition of religion to
the intellectual toolkit of IR analysis. We will defer to another occasion a
discussion of how religion is defined in this field.
Three events in particular recur as emblematic in the religion and IR
literature. These are the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Polish Solidarity
Movement and its role in the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the 2011
9/11 attacks in the United States. They are rehearsed by scholars in reli-
gion and IR to demonstrate the obvious need to take religion seriously if
key events in IR are to be intelligible.
THREE TEST CASES: THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION,
THE END OF THE COLD WAR, AND 9/11
The Iranian Revolution is cast in a variety of ways. It is among “the
watershed events that began to convince political scientists of religion’s
importance” (Fox and Sandler 2004, 19); “an important point for seeing a
re-insertion of religion into international relations” (Haynes 2013, 55). It
is a “vivid example” of religion being ignored or marginalized in the field
of IR (Thomas 2005, 2) or of the “dogma” that “religion was not relevant”
among those who “did not think that religion mattered” (Fox and Sandler
2004, 134; Toft et al. 2011, 12).; It made “more obvious” the existing im-
portance of religion in IR (Fox and Sandler 2004, 134). It is an example of
religion “surging with new political force” (Toft et al. 2011, 13).; It likely
5
I am grateful to Jonathan Fox for drawing attention to this feature of the wider literature.418 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
played a role in reassessing theories of modernization (Fox and Sandler
2004, 19). It was a challenge to those used to reducing religious changes to
class conflicts (Toft et al. 2011, 16). Its religiosity, once acknowledged, led
some to suppose that “Iran may not be a rational state” with which one can
reason or negotiate (Toft in Snyder 2011, 126) or that it was merely a reac-
tion against forced “modernization” (Thomas 2005, 3). It is an example of
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
a religious conflict crossing borders (Fox and Sandler 2004, 71). It marked
a rise in prominence of the idea of martyrdom, identifying a point where
religion and violence meet (Toft in Shah et al. 2012, 130). Finally it marks
for neorealists in IR an instructive case of a country establishing an “ex-
clusive religious stance bound up with open hostility to US dominance”
(Sandal and Fox 2013, 76).
The general theme, with variations, is that before 1978–1979, the out-
look of political theorists and foreign policy makers was resolutely secular
and indeed secularist; the Iranian Revolution took these folk by surprise—
they were unable to anticipate it—and their failure to do justice to it as an
IR phenomenon reveals the necessity of taking religion seriously in IR.
Stephen Chan offers a minority report on this framing of the Iran
Revolution. He is critical of tendencies to cast Iran as an exotic, different,
religious state, and insists that one pay attention to conflicting cultural
forces and contested self-understandings, both “clerical” (more than reli-
gious) and popular. As evidence of such contestations, he introduces Azar
Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel
Persepolis (2000). Like those who have studied the French and Russian re-
volutions, he notices the sharp difference between the enthusiasms of the
early days and the disappointments as power structures reassert them-
selves. Chan calls attention to the difference between the first 100 days
of the revolution (famously covered by Michel Foucault for Corriere della
Sera and le Nouvel Observateur) and the later clerical triumph, which,
in a systematic and oppressive fashion, reshaped and reinterpreted the
everyday religious impulses that had led to the overthrow of Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi. For Chan, it is a travesty to use the same term religion
to describe both periods of revolution and both forms of political action.
Local categories, especially those developed by Iranian writers (including
writers of fiction), need to be taken seriously. This will mean treating
the indigenous secularist and clerical tendencies as, alike, Iranian (Chan
2017, 106–7, 111).6 Chan’s account is significant for this discussion be-
cause it displays a turn to the local without making religion the significant
6
Space does not permit rehearsing here his tragi-comical “four rules” that guide incompetent IR
theory: Chan 2017, 109–10.Adams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 419
term, while also not reducing religion to other factors. Instead, he accom-
modates religious and political actions within categories of everyday life,
and in this he resembles some theologically informed social anthropology
(e.g., Jenkins 1999).
The role of religion in the ending of the Cold War is a contested matter.
Its religious significance is highlighted through consideration of how the
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
Solidarity Movement in Poland developed as a Roman Catholic phenom-
enon; it is cast in terms of the clash of civilizations; it is interpreted as part
of a “religious offensive.” “Religion played a triple-vectored role” (Thomas
2005, 5, drawing on Osa 1997 and Jelen and Wilcox 1998): it mitigated the
alienation of individuals through community; it pushed against totalizing
forces by being resistant to assimilation; it resisted sovietizing forces by
being an alternative principle of organization and mentalité. It is noted
that the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church directly as-
sisted the national church in Poland: “The willingness of Pope John Paul
II to condemn this political system provided needed legitimacy to chal-
lenge these systems and eventually led to their downfall” (Toft in Snyder
2011, 52, 117). “The demise of communism in Eastern Europe was clearly
influenced by the Catholic Church . . . it would hardly be an exaggeration
to say that the Catholic Church is among the actors that rendered the
Eastern European states ‘sovereign’ . . . This was achieved by providing
an anchor of legitimacy both within the inside and outside of the state”
(Sandal and Fox 2013, 83–84). Elizabeth Shakman Hurd casts the matter
from a US perspective as part of an explicit “religious offensive” by the US
State Department from the 1950s onward. “Both Truman and Eisenhower
sought to strengthen US diplomatic ties with the Vatican to work together
to oppose communism” (Hurd 2015, 68–69). This account rehearses ar-
guments from William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy,
1945–1960, which describes religion as “both cause and instrument” in
the Cold War (Inboden 2008, 2). Unlike Iran and 9/11, other IR commen-
tators do not accord the end of the Cold War the same religious signifi-
cance. For some it plays no part at all (e.g., Haynes 2013). Fox and Sandler
imply that the Cold War marked a non-religious theater for IR, whereas
the end of the Cold War marks a religious turn to civilizations that are
religiously conceived. The end of the Cold War itself is not considered
something requiring attention to religion (Fox and Sandler 2004, 119; but
cf. Sandal and Fox 2013 above).
The shift outlined by Samuel Huntington in the early 1990s, from
East-West conflict to conflict between civilizations, prompts questions
for IR scholars (and not only those concerned with religion) about
what a civilization might be. Such questions are far more hospitable to420 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
considerations of religion, which is more plausibly a dimension of a ci-
vilization than of “the East” or “the West.” They are arguably conceived
religiously by Huntington himself (Fox and Sandler 2004, 6, 115–35). The
end of the Cold War is thus doubly religious: analysis calls for attention
to Catholicism in Poland and for attention to the potentially religious cat-
egory of civilization. (The reception of Huntington’s clash thesis among
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
scholars of religion and IR would make an interesting study in its own
right.) Fox and Sandler offer a typically wan assessment, reflecting both
the possibilities and the disappointments for scholars of religion and IR:
“He brought religion into international politics even if he did not call it by
its real name” (Fox and Sandler 2004, 133).
Structurally, the Polish case is exceptionally interesting for IR analysis.
A transnational institution (the Roman Catholic Church) decisively in-
fluences local actors (the Solidarity Movement), which sets in motion a
chain of effects that travel rapidly up the scale to maximal international
significance (the collapse of the Soviet Bloc). It is not surprising that this
case should baffle IR interpretative frameworks that privilege the state:
none of these actors is a state. This does not by itself make the case for
taking religion seriously: there are “realist” analyses of the end of the Cold
War that do not (e.g., Wohlforth 1994, which treats Solidarity without
considering the Roman Catholic Church). That case, for religion, is made
variously: the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland (Thomas 2005,
Toft in Snyder 2011), the influence of the Huntington frame (Sandal and
Fox 2013), and the US religious offensive (Hurd 2015). Scholars of re-
ligion and IR highlight the role of religion as evidence that religion is a
necessary analytical category.
Linz and Stepan offer a minority report and pose the question: What
was special about Poland that forced the ruling Communist Party to share
power with a democratic opposition (Linz and Stepan 1996, 258)? The
answer favored by Thomas, Toft, and Sandal and Fox is that the influence
of the Roman Catholic Church was preeminent in creating forms of re-
sistance. Linz and Stepan offer an alternative explanation, that is, that the
decisive factor was the abnormally monocultural nation, under peculiar
and unique conditions, that Poland had become:
The extermination of Poland’s Jews, the expulsion of the ethnic Germans,
and the incorporation of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian populations into
the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II left the overwhelming
majority of Polish citizens ethnically Polish and Roman Catholic. This
was the first true nation-state in Polish history. (1996, 258)
This by no means downplays the significance of religion. Linz and
Stepan suggest that Roman Catholicism was beloved in Poland preciselyAdams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 421
because it compensated for a lack of nationhood in its former periods
of domination by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. But it suggests that what
looks like a religious dimension is also a matter of violently produced
yet somewhat accidental ethnic and linguistic purity. The religious di-
mension can be interpreted as an effect of larger forces. For example, the
sudden loss of Jewish, German, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian communi-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
ties. This complicates the case for privileging religion as an explanatory
factor for the end of the Cold War. None of the religion and IR discus-
sions that consider the Polish case engage Linz and Stepan on this ques-
tion. This is not to suggest that one must decide between affirming the
role of the Catholic Church and affirming the role of ethnic monocul-
ture. They are surely linked. The monoculture amplified the role of the
church, and the church amplified the power of the Solidarity Movement,
leading to a domino effect. It is to query whether religion is the most
convincing framing concept for this nexus of forces. If one connects
the analysis of Linz and Stepan, which repeats earlier and more detailed
analysis by Suzanne Hruby (1982/83, 318), with the historical account of
Inboden, one has a set of national conditions in Poland (the monocul-
ture) that intersect with a set of national conditions in the United States
(the religious offensive), in which the Roman Catholic Church plays
an unwitting catalytic more than causative role. Hurd describes it as an
agent of American state interests explicitly arrayed against the Soviet
Bloc. This surely merits discussion because it complicates the claim that
the end of the Cold War exemplifies in a straightforward way the turn
to religion.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon are less ambiguous for scholars of religion and IR. One of the re-
peated diagnoses made by scholars of religion and IR is that the refusal to
take religion seriously was in part influenced by an unwarranted geograph-
ical focus on the West, where religious concerns were allegedly marginal.
The 2001 attacks brought the effects of religious actors not just geograph-
ically closer but, for scholars based in the West, dramatically “here.” Fox
and Sandler 2004; Thomas 2005; Hassner 2011; and Shah et al. 2012 open
with it. It “made religion difficult to ignore”. It is “the event that has, per-
haps, caused international Western relations scholars to begin to reassess
their tendency to overlook religion” because it took place in “the heart of
the West” (Fox and Sandler 2004, 16, 21). “Suddenly, religion was back on
the international relations agenda and the world had changed in a flash”
(Haynes 2013, 5). “Seemingly without warning, faith had transgressed the
neat boundaries that organized the thinking and planning of our best and
brightest policy makers, policy analysts, and scholars” (Shah et al. 2012,
1). The crumbling of the assumption that religion was only ever internal422 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
to states “gathered decisive momentum after 9/11 as experts turned to
religion” (Hurd 2015, 23). It was misconstrued as a “nihilist” act making
negotiation fruitless (Thomas 2005, 10, making the same point about 9/11
as Toft made above about Iran). Thomas takes a further, complementary
approach. Rather than make a direct claim that 9/11 has provoked re-
assessment, he rehearses three popular but failing strategies for explaining
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
religion away: (1) claiming that incomplete modernization is responsible
for one last backward and doomed rear-guard action against progress;
(2) economic inequality foments violent envy; and (3) it is merely violent
extremism like other violent extremisms. Thomas answers these crisply:
non-Western cultures may not desire modernization; foreign aid is un-
likely to turn Islamists into liberals; if it is nihilism, it cannot be under-
stood, only stopped. The turn to religion is the offer of understanding
with, it is implied, a tool for sensible policy-making by eliminating a dan-
gerous blind spot (2005, 9–13). 9/11 and the Iranian Revolution are “two
of the most convulsive events for American foreign policy during the past
generation” (Toft et al. 2011, 3).
From this brief set of sketches, one can readily identify two linked phe-
nomena that are said to generate enquiry into religion and IR. The first
are key events (Iran 1979; Soviet Union 1989; September 11, 2001) that
cannot be adequately interpreted, it is persuasively claimed, without
taking into account its religious aspects. The second are the challenges to
what is variously called secularization theory, the secularization hypoth-
esis, or just secularism. The first is a matter of the punctiliar and the dra-
matic: significant events on the world stage that are sudden, momentous,
and baffling (until one takes religion seriously). The second is a matter of
the gradual and the low-key: different theorists at different times call into
question parts of the secular theoretical apparatus that sustain their work
in such a way that this apparatus is slowly undermined (even if this is not
recognized immediately).
There is, however, another difference, and this stimulates the hypoth-
esis offered in this article. The key events are local. They happen in par-
ticular places: Tehran, Gdańsk, and New York; these are focal points for
larger forces that operate across national borders. They are resistant to
generalization. The events each call for an interpretive framework that is
attentive to local particularities. The challenges to secularization theory
are more various and generate a different set of theoretical concerns: these
(surely rightly) call into question the basis for the secularization claims
themselves and show this basis to be historically weak and the claims open
to challenge. Scholars in religion and IR do rehearse challenges to secular-
ization theory for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with theAdams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 423
relevant literature, but this is not their core business. That core business is
the repair of the errors that arise in IR when religion is ignored.
The plea and the case for paying greater attention to religion is ac-
companied not only by salient examples (Iran 1979, Poland 1989, USA
2001) but also by consideration of whether this constitutes a major or
minor change to IR theory. Most studies that are (at least in part) written
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
for graduate students in IR offer an account of how the turn to religion
relates to such theory. IR theory is as complex as any theoretical domain,
and there are multiple systems of classification for it. The species of the
genus IR are arranged in various ways: realism, liberalism, constructivism,
and “others” (Snyder 2011; Kaufman 2018); Marxism, realism, liber-
alism, international society, international political economy (Jackson and
Sørensen 2015); realism, Christian realism, English School, Liberalism,
Neo-Marxism, constructivism (Thomas 2005); realism, neorealism,
neoliberalism, English School, constructivism (Sandal and Fox 2013);
realism, idealism, constructivism, and “others” (Weber 2013); liberalism,
realism, neorealism and neoliberalism, English School, constructivism,
Marxism, critical theory, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism,
Green international theory (Daddow 2013), and so forth.
The root question for those advocating religion and IR as a focus
of study is: Does the turn to religion require a fundamental shift in IR
theory? A fundamental shift means not only adding a new variable, re-
ligion, to other variables such as economy, military, government, power,
property, gender, class, et cetera, but changing the whole in which all
those variable parts are configured. There is for the most part consensus
in the religion and IR literature on this question. The turn to religion is
largely a proposal to add religion to the catalog of variables, and although
this doubtless means an adjustment to the whole, it is not taken to require
a fundamental shift. There are many variations on this theme: “The best
way to account for [religion’s] impact is to integrate it into existing inter-
national relations theory” (Fox and Sandler 2004, 166–67); “Bringing cul-
ture and religion back into the study of international relations requires a
number of changes in the theories of international relations, some of which
have been taking place for some time” (Thomas 2005, 68–69); “Religion
shapes processes that are close to the core of existing international rela-
tions paradigms that have the state as their basic unit. Consequently, it
will be worthwhile to consider how religion can be integrated into these
existing paradigms without violating their essential assumptions” (Snyder
2011, 6); and “For IR theory religion is not a ‘game changer’, although its
various manifestations . . . can at times and in relation to certain issues
be significant” (Haynes 2013, 50). There are many others of this kind.424 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
The repeated message is that religion can be integrated into existing ap-
proaches. In other words, it does not require a fundamental revision of
those approaches.
This is politic for a field that is not yet mainstream. Any announce-
ment of a paradigm shift in IR theory threatens to consign religion and
IR to irrelevance for two reasons. The first is that a proposal for whole-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
sale reconfiguration is much easier to ignore, and more likely to be ig-
nored, than a proposal that can be negotiated within an existing pattern
of inquiry. The second is that there is no identifiable stable paradigm in
IR. New approaches to its theoretical ecology are being proposed all the
time, and these tend to be added to its tail rather than absorbed into its
body, as the classification by Daddow above shows. Green international
theory might be thought so significant as to rewrite the entire DNA of
IR, given the importance of climate change to world politics, but in fact
it appears in Daddow’s scheme as just another interest, like feminism or
postcolonialism. It is probably not the ardent hope of scholars of reli-
gion and IR that religion be timidly added to the already trailing tail of
IR theory. The intention is to integrate attention to religion into the core
of IR theory.
There are two minority reports that challenge this consensus. Petito
and Hatzopoulos (in a relatively early conspectus of religion and IR) sug-
gest that “religion has the potential to revolutionize IR theory. . . . the
return from religion from the (Westphalian) exile brings with it the
promise to emancipate IR from its own theoretical captivities” (Petito and
Hatzopoulos 2003, 3). Petito and Hatzopoulos assume that religion and
IR is to a significant extent a set of proposals consonant with the English
School of IR theory (with explicit appeal to Hedley Bull). This would be
a hazardous approach today, after a period of fifteen years: the current
crop of introductions to IR may neglect religion, but many of them also
do not consider the English School worth mentioning. To tie the for-
tunes of religion and IR to the fate of the English School might well be
to hinder the wider discussion. Scott Thomas complicates his claims re-
hearsed above. Although he suggests that to turn to religion is to surf an
existing wave in IR theory rather than to make new waves, he also urges
his reader to take seriously a possibility foreshadowed more than a decade
before the birth of religion and IR in Robert Wuthnow’s relatively early
article “Understanding Religion and Politics” (1991). In this influential
short piece, Wuthnow proposes several interrelated repairs to existing
approaches to the study of religion in relation to politics. These include
a refusal of over-generalized theories and an embrace of more differen-
tiated approaches. Among over-generalized theories, Wuthnow namesAdams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 425
modernization theory (associated with Peter Berger), world-system
theory (associated with Immanuel Wallerstein), and critical theory (as-
sociated with Jürgen Habermas). The more differentiated approaches are
not rolled up into a single theory but adumbrated as dimensions requiring
attention. These include a shift from prediction to interpretation, from
cause to meaning, from the theorist’s perspective to the actor’s perspec-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
tive, from dramatic historical breaks to differentiated continuities and
discontinuities, from a sweeping temporal frame that deals in centuries
to a concern with changes over the span of a few years, from narratives of
religious decline to accounts of religious adaptation, from a privileging of
the state to taking local institutions and actors seriously. Taken together,
this means acknowledging that relations between religious institutions
and the wider societies in which they are located are constantly renegoti-
ated rather than static. That means in turn that they require attentive local
investigation and are likely to prove resistant to confident explanation in
general terms (Wuthnow 1991).
It can be readily discerned, even from this drastic abbreviation, that
Wuthnow’s concerns lay a pattern that some subsequent scholars in reli-
gion and IR follow quite closely, even if this is not explicitly acknowledged.
(They also describe rather closely the approach taken by Robert Orsi’s
study The Madonna of 115th Street (1985), discussed in and influential for
Hurd [2015], although Wuthnow does not refer to it.) Thomas draws the
obvious conclusion: “A more challenging possibility . . . is that our concept
of what theory is, and what it is supposed to do in international relations
needs to be revised to better account for the impact of culture and religion
on international affairs” (Thomas 2005, 73).
This proposal arguably makes Thomas’s suggestion (along with that
of Petito and Hatzopoulos) a minority report. The suggestion that funda-
mental theoretical revision may be required is one that, for the most part,
scholars of religion and IR seem to avoid or downplay for the reasons
suggested above. Wuthnow’s proposals, which could have constituted a
kind of manifesto for religion and IR, are for the most part not engaged
explicitly. They trace a path not taken, or not yet taken.
The question is nonetheless one of replacement of something if not
the replacement of existing IR theory by an alternative. It is rather the re-
placement of secularization theory (or rather, in IR, the dominance of im-
plicit secular assumptions) by a turn to religion in IR theory. That raises
a further question: How deep in the existing IR theoretical approaches
are commitments to the views articulated in secularization theory (the
idea that increasing modernization is accompanied by or causes decline
in religion)? IR does not explicitly endorse or rehearse any kind of theory426 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
in relation to the secular; religion simply fails to appear as a concern.
The approach typically taken by the early scholars of religion and IR is to
stress that the assumptions and claims of secularization theory are already
collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions together with
a deluge of data and pertinent cases. The turn to religion should be at-
tractive to IR theorists, the argument goes, because secularization theory
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
in IR is not core to the discipline.
This leads to some uncomfortable contrary tendencies. The advo-
cates for religion and IR say two things. First, the effects of seculariza-
tion theory (or at least its unexamined assumptions) on IR are deep and
disastrous, producing false analyses and creating dangerous blind spots.
Second, those assumptions are shallow and eroded, easily relinquished,
and in any case on their last legs. If the turn to religion is a matter of
examining previously unexamined assumptions, the cost of taking reli-
gion seriously is arguably low, and religion can be readily absorbed into
all the existing approaches to IR theory, perhaps even Marxism. That
makes religion and IR a relatively painless cure for the disease of lazy
secular assumptions. There is, however, an alternative framing for these
concerns. The turn to religion is arguably not the replacement of lazy
secular assumptions by theories that now talk about religion. The turn to
religion is more substantially the replacement of theories that focus on
states by theories that focus on local particularities, including those of re-
ligious life. This is surely far more costly. It is a stretch to consider it only
a minor theoretical adjustment. The deeper question is then whether or
to what extent existing “mainstream” IR theories can accommodate a
turn to the local.
THE TURN TO THE LOCAL
At key points in the various cases made for the importance of re-
ligion, the issue of locality comes to the fore. Fox and Sandler identify
linkage politics (i.e., the linkage between domestic and international pol-
itics) as a significant site for identifying the significance of religion (Fox
and Sandler 2004, 5). “Consequently [for Samuel Huntington] religion is
growing stronger as a local and more authentic basis for legitimacy” at
every level of analysis (Fox and Sandler 2004, 118).
The turn to the local here names three tendencies: a shift from a focus
on the actions of states to the actions of members of states (local actors);
a concern with the influence of civil society bodies on national govern-
ments (local institutions); and a focus on relations between religious tra-
ditions within a state or a nation (local inter-religious encounters).Adams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 427
The fundamental point is made succinctly by Scott Thomas: “Realism
has been able to marginalize religion because it focuses on states and the
interaction between states in international society” (Thomas 2005, 55–56,
echoed in Haynes 2013, 10). Religion is of course not the only casualty
of this focus on states. It just as obviously marginalizes the significance
of multinational cartels, international banks, or cross-border crime (if
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
these are different things). Thomas sees the resurgence of religion as, in
part, a turn to non-state actors, of which group religious actors make up
a significant part.
The turn to religion is in part a challenge to the tendency in IR to gen-
eralize quickly from particular cases to inform as wide a range of possible
phenomena as possible or, even more problematically, not to generalize
from cases at all but to fit them into a procrustean frame established a
priori. This frame is typically the frame of governmental policy, in which
the guiding categories change very slowly. Why then should scholars of
religion and IR not simply make a turn to the local and, without reserva-
tions, embrace in IR the locally attentive approaches taken by scholars of
religion?
This line of reasoning is anticipated and critiqued in advance by Ron
Hassner, who distinguishes between broad, deep, and thick considerations
of religion and IR. In this taxonomy, broad approaches tend to generalize
by reducing religion to something else (economics, politics, etc.), whereas
deep approaches focus on local particularities but refuse to generalize
much, if at all. Thick approaches are a happy medium: attentive to local
details but willing “to generalize from particular religious movements,
regions, or instances to arrive at broader conclusions for international
relations” (Hassner 2011, 37). This reflects parallel debates among his-
torians and anthropologists that go back at least to David Hume and his
interpreters about reasoning from cases and the scope of generalization.
Hassner maps this terrain of debate on to the IR concept of “levels of ana-
lysis,” which broadly differentiates individual, state, and international
focal points. This furnishes a tool to show that broad approaches correlate
with international focus and deep approaches correlate with more indi-
vidual (or at least local) focus. It also suggests a cure: “What is lacking
is [thick religion] that combines an international relations focus with an
interpretivist methodology” (Hassner 2011, 47). This cure thus involves
“bridging” levels of analysis and methods.
Hassner suggests that a thick approach can generalize from particulars
by subjecting them to a matrix of general terms, namely theology, hier-
archy, iconography, ceremony, and belief. This matrix in turn is composed
of even more general elements, namely tenets, texts, rules, rank, authority,428 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
symbols, myths, images, and rituals. The core proposal is that scholars
of religion and IR should deploy this matrix to produce analyses that
trace seemingly non-religious international effects back to local religious
causes. Hassner modestly identifies studies by Mark Juergensmeyer and
Daniel Philpott as exemplary thick approaches, but these have their own
methodological agendas; he could more persuasively have commended
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
his own War on Sacred Grounds (Hassner 2009).
War on Sacred Grounds deserves serious attention from scholars of
religion. It is attentive to local particularities and argues from two cases
requiring approaches that are both historical and to an extent anthropo-
logical: the Israeli capture of the Temple Mount on June 7, 1967, and the
occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979 by armed
followers of Juhayman al-Utaybi. It offers significantly more local detail
in relation to the two cases than is typically given in IR analyses. In exem-
plary fashion, the study lays out authority structures, the religious beliefs
of the main actors, and the history of the sites as understood within the
relevant religious traditions. The Jerusalem case is framed with discussion
of relevant rabbinical rulings past and then-present. The Mecca case is
cast against a background of the authority of the ulema in Saudi Arabia.
The two cases are studies of successful conflict management, and the roles
of rabbis and the ulema are central to that successful management, that is,
the deescalation of violence. This forms the main substance of Hassner’s
analysis. The final paragraphs of each case explicitly make the link to the
higher level of analysis, that is, their international impact. In the Jerusalem
case, the publication in 1991 of The Temple Mount Book by Rabbi Schlomo
Goren became what Hassner calls “the theological manifesto of the ex-
tremist Temple Mount movements,” which in turn laid the grounds for
a call in 2007 by leading Israeli rabbis for Jews to fill the Temple Mount
with prayer, thus unravelling the peaceful settlement of 1967 and setting
the scene for renewed conflict between Jews and Muslims in the Holy
City and beyond (Hassner 2009, 133). In the Mecca case, the reliance of
the Saudi Royal family on religious support (which led to retaking the
mosque) “resulted in regime concessions to the ulema on the religious
front and a Wahabi revival in Saudi Arabia” (Hassner 2009, 150). This,
in turn, set the stage for the ideology of transnational terror movements.
Both cases clearly exemplify the virtues articulated in Hassner’s program-
matic article produced around the same time: the importance of paying
attention to local and international factors simultaneously and showing
how causation travels up and down the levels of analysis.
This concern with local actors, local institutions, and local inter-
religious encounter complicates the three test cases of the IranianAdams: The Birth of “Religion and International Relations” 429
Revolution, the end of the Cold War, and the 9/11 attacks. All three re-
quire analysis of something other than state actors, but they do not all
display the same local dynamics. The Iranian Revolution is the easier case
to make as there are identifiable local actors and institutions whose inter-
ests are expressed as forces with national effects. By contrast, the end of
the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks present puzzling features. The Roman
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/2/411/6238624 by guest on 02 December 2021
Catholic Church is a transnational organization whose members are or-
ganized into local dioceses. Its churches are certainly local institutions,
but they are also non-state actors by virtue of their obedience to Rome,
expressed in their governance according to Canon Law—hardly a local
legal code. Al Qaeda is a transnational organization whose members op-
erate within a network. Its agents act locally, but they often travel large
distances to achieve their aims—this, too, is not only a matter of local
political forces. Just as the concept of levels of analysis in IR requires a
consideration of transnational networks as well as the triad of individual,
national, and international, so the turn to religion in IR requires attention
to transnational networks as well as a focus on local particularity.
However, a willingness to consider local religious institutions as parti-
cipants in broader networks needs to be differentiated from a tendency to
cast local events merely as the effects of wider forces. Hurd’s suggestion,
cited above, that the events of 1989 were part of a religious offensive by the
US State Department is an interesting example. It broadens one’s under-
standing of US foreign policy, but it directs attention away from local
Polish action. The meaningfulness to Poles of their actions does not enter
the frame; indeed it is excluded from such a view because the main actors
in the drama are US officials, and locally particular Polish actions are re-
cast as actions by the Catholic Church, conceived as an entity based in the
Vatican with which the US government can engage diplomatically. Poles
recede quickly from view. The scholars whose work is reviewed here have
an opportunity to consider Solidarity as a theater of local concerns, trans-
porting the reader to Gdańsk as it were, but this is not a path they take.
They generally move rather quickly to talk of The Catholic Church rather
than local actors. This serves as a reminder that attempts to do justice
to religion are under constant pressure of redescription in more familiar
(and less local) IR terms. It is worth resisting this pressure given that
whenever external forces and institutions are invoked, there is a danger
that local actors and their reasons drop out of the picture.
The promise of religion and IR is an account of the end of the Cold
War in which the role of Solidarity in Poland might be understood sim-
ultaneously as local actions by local communities with local reasons
and as expressions of transnational networks with interests that may beYou can also read
